When news came through on Tuesday that Melbourne’s iconic Hopetoun Tea Rooms had gone into administration, the most pained reaction I saw was, separately, from three actual Marxists — grizzled veterans of the demonstration and the trestle table.
I recalled taking tea there with one, decades ago, when the place was still just an old, old cafe. We argued about Kronstadt or something as lavender-haired ladies rehearsed tennis club gossip from the ’50s at nearby tables, and the cakes floated by on three-tiered silver trays.
By the end of the morning we were both essentially stoned on sugar, like nuns at a once-yearly convent high tea.
The Hopetoun can’t be allowed to die, though not just because it serves as a venue for socialist debate and its troubles are a call to arms of sorts, ridiculous as that sentence just looked.
The place, a tea shop of green flock wallpaper, marbled tables and glittering trays of creamy extravaganzas, opened in Melbourne in 1904. It is the last example of that once-ubiquitous hospo venue: the tea shop and luncheon room, the sort of place that predated the modern cafe by a couple of decades (the cafe was pretty much introduced to Australia by Greeks, in the 1910s).
The serving of its pinwheel sandwiches — spirals of buttered bread lined with ham and mustard, asparagus and the like — go back into the mists of time. For decades, the place had mouldered slowly on, a feature of Melbourne’s delicious noble rot of the ’70s and ’80s, when one could roam dying cafes from 7am until midnight.
Its clientele appeared to be ageing debs, clinking china, as they reminisced about part-time modelling work and meeting here in white gloves in the ’50s, and complaining about their retired-surgeon husbands. When they had all gone, the place had a problem.
Ten years ago it was sold and the new owners marketed it as a tourist experience, with wild success. Nothing was more gob smacking to me, coming back to Melbourne, than to see a queue of tourists from all corners of the world lined up at its doors waiting for their half-hour of wielding the cake fork.
That demand encouraged the new owners to try and convert part of the Block Arcade basement (which once held the workshops of the arcade’s tailors’ shops) to extra dining space. This got into legal tangles, and the owners are now left with a $1.5 million bill, which appears to be the kicker in their COVID-induced financial crisis.
Maybe they needed the extra space, maybe they got greedy, who knows. But the plain fact is that a city like Melbourne can’t let something like the Hopetoun Tea Rooms die, and still retain its soul.
The COVID-19 crisis is threatening to take a lot of iconic businesses to the wall, and it’s an invitation to think about how we value what we value as the world shifts.
Consider this paradox:
Many people, hearing of the demise of a beloved place like the Hopetoun, would feel a certain dismay at its possible passing, yet also a sense of its inevitability.
At the same time they would see it as natural and inevitable that state money should be sunk into big faceless banks, dying airlines, etc, even if it’s clear we’d never get it back.
The money, or even just a rates or tax suspension that would keep a place like the Hopetoun afloat, is a mere mille-feuilles compared to big corporations’ predators banquet. Yet the proposition is not an easy sell.
Why? The immediate answer would be that things come and go all the time. But that answer is only half-right. In our era, such decades-old quirky little places — the uniqueness of a city — go, but only to be replaced by franchise chains or short-term outfits that last for a year or so and then vanish, and have little connection with our history.
We are thus losing a great deal of what tied us to what we were. The frequent reaction to such is to shrug one’s shoulders and say “that’s life”.
The question once again is: why? Why is that life? Because a certain regime of capital says so? To agree to that is to simply internalise the nihilism of capitalism, its structural cynicism, which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Why not advance a simpler ethic more akin to the hybrid, muddle-along process we apply to the loves and enthusiasms of our personal lives? If something’s worth keeping, we find a way to do it, and abstract principle is revealed as a fetishism.
If something like the Hopetoun says that the small decadence of a caramel eclair is a good thing, why not generalise that principle? In the case of the Hopetoun and other shops affected by COVID-19, local councils and the state government should set up an iconic businesses support fund that can be tapped if their viability is threatened in a way it might otherwise not have been.
There’s nothing fair about such a proposal, which should operate at pure ministerial or council discretion; one cafe can be denied, another next door be saved.
I would have said that a far from complete list of eligible places in the Melbourne CBD would include: Pellegrini’s, the Paperback Bookshop, the Hill of Content bookshop, Florentino’s, the Shark Fin Inn, the Exford Hotel (last old pub in the CBD), Stalactites and Tsindos Greek bistro (the last places of old Lonsdale St Greektown), The Basement Discs (last CBD record store), City Basement Secondhand books, Touch of Paris hairdressers in the subterranean Campbell Arcade (also under threat), the black and white foto booth on Flinders st, the Hopetoun, the Crazy Horse adult cinema (might be some pushback on that), and a few others. My, how thin it has all got, what’s left of us.
Other councils could do the same, and other cities. I’m sure Sydney could rustle up two or three things more than 15 years old. I’d also make a plea to restore the Golden Tower red vinyl cafe late of Swanston st, Gaslight records and its naked shopping day, and the Met Zone 3 ticketing area, but those are battles for another time.
For the moment, let’s try and hang on to what we’ve got. There is an obvious economic tourism argument to be made — Melbourne’s rise from non-destination to tourist mecca over three decades has occurred only because we have retained the richness and variety of urban living that thousands of cities have lost — but I wanted to make the argument from life first and foremost.
The elegant arabesques of a piled-high meringue matter as much to a culture as the stone buttresses of a cathedral. Indeed, they’re the same thing. Only the materials differ.
Forget all that creative destruction crap. Ask of yourself what you love and then find a way to keep it, and that is pretty much all of douceur de vivre.
I too recall taking tea there decades ago ..Mid morning quite empty ..Sitting at a table by myself .An older gentleman came up & asked to join me .We spoke about country Vic ..I was from East Gippsland ..talk of footy ,about the locals, etc…Then he said ,after quite a long time of conversation ….” I have to go, got a Govt meeting ” .Lovely man ..He turned out to be Pastor Doug Nicholls.
This comment has brightened my day.
Places like the Hopetoun are as close to the recently-destroyed dreamtime Pilbara shelter caves as colonial settler society gets. Maybe it’s fitting that we seem equally blasé about the destruction of both.
Melbourne is the stately grand old dame of the South, but it seems to me that its spirit is getting shoved further and further towards the boundaries of the CBD. To the east we have Treasury Gardens and State Parliament and the old theatres and the Menzies hotel. To the west we have some remnants of the 19th century warehouses. North are the terrace houses that merge into the inner suburbs. South – well there’s Flinders Street station and the gardens. Might even allow the arts centre, just (but don’t get me started on Fed Square or Southbank). In the middle we have increasingly soulless, barren canyons.
We’ve lost so much from our city over the decades. Years ago during the Depression my grandfather and his mate used to drive a horse and cart laden with fruit and veg from the local market gardens in to the Eastern market in Bourke Street, which was located where the Southern Cross hotel was built. The Southern Cross was where the Beatles stayed when they visited in the 1960s, but it too has now been gone almost two decades – and that’s just in one small corner of the city.
I think what little remains is well worth preserving – in its original form and function to the extent that is possible. The Libs claim to be the party of small business. It’s about time they put our money where their mouth is.
The area in the basement was a popular op shop the last time I visited Melbourne – is this where the tearoom expansion was planned?
Australians spend many dollars on international travel to quaint European places which retain character. Meantime we overlook the offerings on home turf.
Stalactites, Guy, a ripper spot. Pleased to hear others appreciate it.
Spot on, Guy. Might one also include The European, and also the Monarch cafe at St. Kilda? (which I hope is still there…)
Alas it has always been. Our histories are all related to people, establishments, things and places that once were. Capitalism markets those memories to us as a basis for wanting the present moment.
But heritage protection could be extended to protect iconic establishments – ensure they are sold to a buyer committed to the history.
Right now, the only practical way, endorsed by Capitalism, is the devotees must buy or invest in icons.
It raises an important point about democracy being revitalised. Agency and power of society must be facilitated by government if authentic democracy can be resuscitated; eg governance and secretarial support for groups who pursue social good. A Noam Chomsky idea.